


Words and Weapons

by Anonymous



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:10:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of a shared traumatic experience, Pepper starts to heal. Natasha, less so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words and Weapons

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to [this prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/5758.html?thread=7287166) at avengerkink. Staying anonymous because this is about a billion times more explicit than anything I've ever written, and I'm deeply self-conscious about it.

Natasha wakes up in a room empty except for her, a bed, and Pepper.

“You’re up!” Pepper says the moment Natasha cracks her eyes open. She sounds relieved.

Natasha’s head is pounding. The light is bright, harsh, and fluorescent. Her guns are gone. She tries to remember how she got here, but the last thing she can recall is sitting in Pepper’s office in Stark Tower, discussing funding for the Avengers.

“What happened?” she asks, looking around. The walls and floor of the room are cement. No windows, but there’s a reinforced steel door in the corner. Natasha pushes herself off the bed with some effort and trudges over to inspect it. Her vision swims.

“We were in my office,” Pepper says. “They hit you with some kind of gas, and when you passed out, they took me at gunpoint.”

Knock-out gas would explain Natasha’s headache. She runs her hands over the door, but there are no weak points, no loose bolts. The hinges are on the other side. “Who’s they?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Soldiers, I guess. Goons. Hired guns.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow at Pepper, who chuckles. “What kind of guns were they carrying?” Natasha asks. “What were they wearing? Did they speak? Did they have accents?”

“One of them told me to come with them,” Pepper says. “He sounded American. Mid-west. They were wearing, I don’t know, not so different from what you’re wearing.”

There are vents on the walls near the ceiling, but they’re not big enough to crawl through.

“Any insignia?” Natasha asks.

“Not that I saw.”

Mounted in every corner of the room, where the walls hit the ceiling, is a small video camera. Natasha carefully doesn’t look at them.

“What about the guns?” she asks.

“Big guns,” Pepper says. “Rifles, I guess.”

“You’re the CEO of a weapons company, and the best you can give me is ‘Rifles, I guess?’”

Pepper smooths her skirt and tosses her hair. “ _Ex_ -weapons company, and I’ve never been involved with R&D.”

“ _Civilians_ ,” Natasha says, in the same instant that a fan starts whirring somewhere behind the vents. A few moments later, the air hits her, and she smells honeysuckle. And it all makes sense.

The good news: Natasha knows who has her and Pepper, and what he wants.

The bad news: What he wants.

“Do you smell that?” she asks, so quickly her words slur together. She doesn’t have much time. “The honeysuckle, do you smell it?”

Pepper looks around, as if trying to see the honeysuckle in the air. “What are you talking about?”

Natasha doesn’t know if she’s relieved or upset that Pepper can’t smell the gas. “Pepper,” she says, “I’m about to attack you. The honeysuckle is a gas, a drug, and it’s going to make me rape you. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand,” Pepper says, but it’s too late for Natasha to explain any better. The gas is in her blood, and she is gone.

It’s three long strides over to where Pepper sits on the bed. Pepper’s eyes are wide, and she scrambles back, nearly falling onto the floor in her haste to get away from Natasha. But Natasha is faster and stronger and better trained. She grips Pepper’s wrists in one hand and pins them to the mattress above her head.

“Natasha,” Pepper says, “stop!”

A few strands of Pepper’s hair have slipped out of her neat chignon and are caught in the corner of her mouth, between the creases of her thin, pale lips. Natasha wants those lips, and right now wanting is the same as having. She brushes the hair away with her free hand, leans down, and kisses her.

Pepper shouts something, muffled and unintelligible, and Natasha takes the opportunity to slip her tongue into her mouth. She can taste Pepper’s lipstick; it mingles with her own. Pepper tries to turn her head to the side, but Natasha grabs her chin and forces it back to the front.

Pepper kicks wildly, and one of her high, elegant heels makes contact with Natasha’s hip. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough for her to notice. She pulls back and laughs.

“Okay,” she says.

She straddles Pepper’s hips, a knee on either side. Pepper keeps kicking, but Natasha is well out of her range. Maybe if Pepper were a gymnast or a spy; maybe if she knew how to leverage her own weight against an opponent. But she isn’t, and she doesn’t.

_No_ , says a voice somewhere in Natasha’s head. But it is outgunned.

“ _Please_ , Natasha,” Pepper says. “You can fight this. Please, you can.”

Natasha smiles. “There’s nothing to fight,” she says, and leans down to unbutton Pepper’s blazer. Business clothes are wonderful, she realizes. They’re so easy to get into. It takes her only a few seconds to lay open Pepper’s blazer and button-down shirt, exposing her breasts, small and round and smooth in her lace bra.

Pepper is still talking frantically, but Natasha ignores her. She cups Pepper’s left breast in her right hand. It’s heavy and warm, but when she bends down and licks around the lace edge of Pepper’s bra, the skin is cool and slippery. She bites down gently, experimentally, and Pepper jerks away. Or tries to—there’s nowhere to go.

Natasha keeps working her tongue under and around the edge of Pepper’s bra as she moves her free hand down Pepper’s body. She feels blindly for the zipper at Pepper’s hip and undoes it. With one motion, she pushes Pepper’s skirt and panties halfway down her thighs. Pepper sobs, and Natasha sits up.

Between Natasha’s tongue and Pepper’s own panicked breathing, Pepper’s left breast has come halfway out of her bra. She’s crying openly now, tears trickling down her cheekbones and sinking into her hair and ears. Her eyes are red, and her lipstick is smeared. She is lovely, and Natasha wants her in every way.

It’s difficult to take off a bodysuit one-handed, but Natasha is talented, and she manages. When she’s naked except for her bra, she pulls Pepper’s wrists up from the bed and holds them out in front of her. She slips one leg in between Pepper’s and grinds, hard. She rocks back and forth, pushing her cunt against Pepper’s.

“ _Please_ ,” Pepper whispers. She tries to pull her wrists away, but Natasha holds them harder. Pepper is warm and angular under her. She moans.

“You hear that?” Natasha says. “That’s real. That’s how good you are.” Pepper should know that. She should know that Natasha is so turned on, she’s moaning for real, and not to fool some mark.  
Natasha is overcome by the urge to reciprocate, to make Pepper moan too. She backs up, reaches down, and slips a finger into her, pumps it back and forth and swirls it in circles. Pepper is warm and wet, but not wet enough. She starts to kick again, and Natasha takes her finger away.

“All right,” she says. “That’s all right.”

She moves up the bed, pulling Pepper’s wrists with her, and settles her cunt over Pepper’s mouth. Pepper writhes and screams, but she couldn’t break the kiss and she can’t break this.

“Lick,” Natasha says simply.

Pepper breathes heavily through her nose. Her lips are pursed tight. Natasha grabs her right index finger and pulls it back until it snaps.

She feels Pepper’s scream more than she hears it. “Lick,” she says again.

Pepper licks. She’s tentative and inexperienced, but Natasha is too far gone for it to matter. She rides Pepper’s mouth, her head thrown back, her thighs tense. It builds and builds and builds, and then she comes, hard and long.

The fan stops whirring. Natasha comes back to herself with Pepper’s wrists still in her hand, her tongue still twitching feebly against her clitoris.

“Oh, God,” Natasha says. She lets go of Pepper’s wrists. They drop, and Pepper whimpers.

Natasha rolls off the bed. “Oh, God, Pepper.”

Pepper pushes herself up, and winces. She must have hit her broken finger.

“Your clothes are on the other side of the bed,” Pepper says.

By the time Natasha has her suit and shoes back on, Pepper has put herself back together. Her shirt and blazer are buttoned. Her skirt is zipped and unwrinkled. Even her hair has been put back in place. Only her smeared lipstick and quickly swelling finger show that anything has happened.

“It’s a man I seduced back when I worked for the Russians,” Natasha says. “He’s a scientist. He has this gas that. Well, you saw what.”

“Why didn’t it work on me?” Pepper says. She looks over Natasha’s shoulder, at the blank, featureless wall.

“It only works on about one in five people. Pepper, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t,” Pepper says sharply. She’s crying again.

Natasha backs into a corner. She wants to cry, too. She wants Clint, and bizarrely, she also wants to never see Clint or anyone else she knows ever again. She wants Pepper to look at her. She wants Pepper to disappear. _She_ wants to disappear.

That’s when the door bursts open, and the cavalry arrives.

#

Harry Gruen—the man responsible for Natasha and Pepper’s abduction, the man Natasha seduced and betrayed all those years ago—is locked away in a SHIELD prison. SHIELD medical has set Pepper’s finger and run tests on Natasha’s blood. Natasha has tersely and stone-facedly briefed Fury on what happened.

She walks out of Fury’s office and finds Clint waiting for her in the hall. He falls into step with her.

“The others took Pepper home,” he says.

Natasha looks at him out of the corner of her eye, but doesn’t turn her head. She keeps quiet.

“You okay?” he asks.

When the team found them, Clint had taken one look at Natasha and known what happened. He didn’t _say_ he knew what happened, but Natasha knew he knew.

He’d walked toward her, but she’d slipped away from him and out of the room.

“I’m fine,” she says now.

“Pepper told us what happened,” Clint says. “Well, she told Tony and told him to tell us.”

They get in the elevator, and Natasha pushes the button for the ground floor. She would very much like Clint to stop talking.

“I know you remember what you told me after Loki,” he says.

“Then you probably shouldn’t bring it up,” she says.

They make the rest of the trip home in silence.

A work crew has already arrived to fix the broken window in Pepper’s office when they get back to Stark Tower. Stark’s money works wonders.

The elevators in the tower are set up such that the Avengers have to go through the communal floor in order to get to their individual quarters. The team—sans Tony—have gathered in the common living room. They each sit, alone in their thoughts, their heads down. Natasha would slip past them unnoticed, but Clint announces their arrival.

“Hey guys,” he says.

Rogers looks up. “Natasha,” he says.

He’s about to ask her how she is. “How’s Pepper?” she asks, cutting him off.

“About as well as can be expected,” Bruce says. “She and Tony are on their floor.”

“Good,” Natasha says.

“She knows it wasn’t you,” Bruce says.

“Good,” she says again. The analytical part of her brain—the spy’s intuition, the part that would normally be alert to the fact that Bruce is more attuned than the rest to questions of blame, the part that would normally be reading her teammates’ body language for signs of how their view of her has changed—seems to have stopped working. She is without words and without weapons. She wishes she still had her guns. “I’m going to take a shower now.”

Clint and the others watch her walk away.

#

Natasha takes five showers over the next two days. She works out in her personal gym. She cleans and inspects her guns and knives—the ones she hadn’t had on her when she was taken. She eats bread and peanut butter and drinks milk a day past its expiration date, because that’s what she has in her kitchenette. She lets Clint in when he drops by, but she doesn’t leave her floor.

As someone who prides herself on her self-awareness, Natasha wishes she understood why she’s hiding away. But every time she tries to think about it, to work through how she’s feeling, she remembers saying, “ _That’s how good you are_ ,” and her mind skitters away from the subject.

After two days, she has to leave her floor to attend a mandatory meeting with a SHIELD therapist. She runs into Tony coming out of the kitchen, a cup of coffee in each hand. One for him, one for Pepper. Tony stares at her; she stares at the circle of light glowing through his shirt. Natasha realizes suddenly that it is fear of exactly this moment that has kept her in her room for two days.

“I’ve got to get upstairs,” Tony says.

Natasha steps aside to let him past.

Stark has never been Natasha’s biggest fan, and she is certain now that she will lose him over this. He probably won’t turn her out of the tower, not when he has to answer to the other Avengers, but maybe she should leave anyway. Living where one isn’t wanted is usually more trouble than it’s worth.

Maybe the Avengers won’t give him that much trouble. They know, as Natasha does, that she’s not responsible for what happened to Pepper, but knowledge and acceptance are different matters. Natasha knows as well as anyone that trust is hard won and easily lost.

The trip from Stark Tower to SHIELD’s New York headquarters is short—only a few blocks. Natasha walks the whole way with her hand over her concealed gun.

The SHIELD therapist, Dr. Walker, is an intelligent, well-spoken woman. She’s perceptive, educated, strong-willed, and absolutely no match for Natasha. She’s cleared to return to duty within the hour.

#

“Pepper’s back to work,” Clint says the next night, while they’re watching movies in Natasha’s room.

“Okay…?” Natasha says, as if she’s not interested at all and doesn’t know why he’d think she would be.

“Oh, don’t play at that. You wanted to know.” Clint passes the bowl of popcorn to her. “Stark hired some frou-frou therapist with five Ph.D.s.”

“Is she cleared to know the details?” Natasha grabs a fistful of popcorn and pulls the kernels from her hand with her tongue one at a time.

“Yes,” Clint says. “And it’s a he. I think Stark figured that would be better, all things considered.”

“Yeah,” she says.

Clint takes the popcorn back. “I don’t really like this movie. Want to go see if the others want to watch something better?”

Not at all. “Okay,” she says.

The others, it transpires, have beat them to it. The whole team is gathered in the living room, watching _The Wizard of Oz_. It’s the part where Dorothy is trapped in the Witch’s castle, and the hourglass is counting down the time she has left to live. Bruce, Thor, and Rogers are in front of the television, squished together on one of Stark’s extra-large reinforced sofas. Tony and Pepper sit off to the side, sharing an easy chair.

Pepper looks up when Natasha and Clint enter. Her finger is still bandaged. Natasha tastes Pepper’s lipstick; she swallows.

Thor pauses the movie—how he ended up with the remote, Natasha can’t guess.

“Will you join us?” Thor says. “Pepper chose the movie.”

“I just came down to get a soda,” Natasha says. “But Clint will stay and watch with you.”

“I will?”

“Yeah,” she says. “You will.”

She goes to the kitchen, pulls a Coke from the fridge, and tiptoes back upstairs. She doesn’t drink the Coke. Instead, she brushes her teeth for five minutes straight.

#

_”I love you,” Pepper says. She’s spread out naked on the bed, legs apart, hands resting casually above her head. “Come and take me.”_

_“I don’t want to,” Natasha says._

_“You always want to.”_

_Natasha steps forward. There’s a tube of lipstick in her hand. She straddles Pepper’s waist, a knee on either side, and spreads the lipstick across her lips. It’s bright red._

_Pepper smiles. “Take me.”_

_Natasha leans down and kisses her. The kiss breaks, and the body under her has changed from Pepper to Harry Gruen. His lips are very red. She can taste the lipstick._

_“I love you,” Natasha says._

She wakes up suddenly and quietly, and spends the rest of the night in the gym.

#

Three days after being cleared for duty, Natasha gets an assignment. It’s a softball mission: short, local, and easy. There’s a man in New York with a flash drive. Her job is to get the drive and replace it with a duplicate without the man noticing. In order to do that, she has to convince him to show it to her.

It’s not difficult to get an unsuspecting man to brag. Natasha approaches him at his hotel bar.

“Are you here for a conference?” she says.

The man stares at her. _Me?_ he’s thinking. _Could she possibly be talking to me?_

Natasha fills the silence for him. “I saw a sign for a medical conference. You look like you could be a doctor. Or a lawyer.”

The man clears his throat. “Engineer, actually. And no, I’m not here for a conference.”

The bartender hands Natasha the martini she ordered earlier. She takes a sip, leaving lipstick behind on the glass.

“One of them MIT boys, huh?” Natasha says, stretching her words out into a drawl for comedic effect. “I applied to CMU, but I guess I wasn’t technical enough. Ended up at Berkley, instead.”

“I went to Stanford, actually,” the man says. “You’re from California?”

“Menlo Park,” she says. The man—she knows from his file—is from San Francisco proper.

“Where did you go to high school?” he asks, excited.

They chat for a few minutes about San Francisco. Natasha’s never been there, but if the man’s enthusiasm is any indication, she should give it a try.

“So, Stanford?” she says. “You must be a smart cookie.”

Your average bumbling engineer, she has found, doesn’t trust a smooth woman in a black cocktail dress showering him with innuendo. They like their women a little quirky.

The man grins. “I’m good at what I do.”

_That’s how good you are._

Natasha takes another sip of her drink to wash away the feeling of Pepper’s smooth, slippery skin between her teeth.

“I bet you are,” she says. She’s trying to flirt with this man, but she’s forgotten how. The first step is feeling desirable, and she feels anything but. Every inch of her is consumed with the feeling of Pepper underneath her.

This is not supposed to be the hard part of her job. Sex is easy; emotions are hard. Sex is all about what’s already there. Emotions have to be built up. Natasha’s never felt guilty about it, any of it, never felt ashamed. She has plenty to be guilty about in her past, and sex is a long fall from the top of the list.

So why does she suddenly want to cry and apologize to this man?

Natasha gets through the rest of the night on pure physical attraction. When she gets the drive, she runs the moment the man turns his head away.

#

The next morning, Natasha wakes up from a short night of poor sleep and thinks, _I was raped_.

She doesn’t do anything with it at first. She goes about her day—makes breakfast, stretches, writes her report from the night before—and lets it sit there in her mind. Every once in a while, she thinks it again: _I was raped_.

The more she thinks it, the truer it feels. It doesn’t change anything. But it’s good to admit it to herself.

She goes for a run. Normally, she prefers to run outside, but she wants to think with as few distractions as possible, and the outside world is one huge, terrifying distraction right now. So she sets the treadmill to a six-minute mile and coasts.

_I was raped_ , she thinks again, to get the ball rolling.

There’s really no question about that. If rape is sex without consent—and it is—then she was raped, never mind that the rapist was never in the same room as her. Having put the word out there, though, Natasha doesn’t think it changes much. Her whole life has been geared toward training her to deal with charged, emotional situations. She’s not going to break down because of something as stupid as being raped, especially not when Pepper is out there, living her life, after getting the much more traumatic end of the deal. She’s not going to break down. She won’t let herself.

Natasha pushes the pace up to a 4-minute mile, and stops thinking.

#

“We haven’t seen much of you, this past week,” Rogers says .

Natasha steps past him and pulls the bread from the top of the fridge. She’s starving.

“Do we have any ham?” she says, pulling the fridge open.

“Bruce puts it in the door.”

“Weird.” She takes out the ham and a block of cheddar cheese. When she turns around, Rogers has already laid out two slices of bread on a plate for her.

“We missed you during the movie, the other day,” he says.

Natasha grabs a knife from a nearby drawer and cuts a precise, even slice off the cheese. “I didn’t want to make Pepper uncomfortable,” she says. “It’s her home.”

Steve lays four slices of ham neatly across the bread. “It’s your home, too.”

She just smiles at him and puts the cheese and bread on top of the sandwich, picks up the plate, and turns to leave. “Thanks for the help.”

“I was going to make myself one,” Steve says. “Why don’t you eat with me?”

Tony’s laugh echoes through the hallways from far away. He’s headed toward the kitchen. Natasha slips away.

A few hours later, Natasha is startled by a knock at the front door of her quarters. She opens the door, expecting Clint, and finds Pepper.

“I think we should talk,” Pepper says.

If Natasha wanted to, she could rip Pepper’s suit off and take her right here on the staircase. She doesn’t want to—it’s the last thing in the world she wants—but she can’t stop thinking about it. The snap of Pepper’s finger breaking. The feeble movement of her tongue.

“You don’t want to talk to me,” Natasha says.

Pepper crosses her arms and freezes Natasha with her glare. “I’ll thank you not to tell me what I want.”

“You don’t _have_ to talk to me,” Natasha says.

“I refer you back to point number one. I _want_ to talk to you.”

The smell of honeysuckle. The sound of Pepper’s muffled screams. If Natasha has to look at Pepper for another second, she thinks she might scream, and screaming is unacceptable.

“You shouldn’t,” she says, and slams the door shut.

#

Natasha is almost done packing her bags when Clint barges through her door. She draws her gun and aims it at him before she can even think. He just glances down the barrel and shrugs.

“What?” she says, holstering the gun. She picks a cocktail dress up from the sofa and folds it neatly into a duffel bag.

“We’re not doing this anymore,” he says. “Stop packing.”

“If I stop packing, I won’t have any clothes when I leave. I’ll have to buy a whole new wardrobe.”

Clint steps slowly in between her and the sofa. “Stop leaving.”

He’s so earnest, his hands out, palms forward, his eyes wide. Natasha rolls her eyes. “I’ll tell you where I end up,” she says. “I’m not leaving you.”

“You’re leaving the others.”

Natasha reaches around him and picks up the next dress. “You and I both knew this team thing wasn’t going to work for me long-term. If it hadn’t been this, it would’ve been something else.”

“Why won’t you just tell them you’re upset?”

Another dress folded on top of the last in neat rectangles, like cards stacked in a deck. “I’m not upset.”

Clint pulls the duffel bag away from her. She could’ve stopped him, but she doesn’t want to hurt him. “Don’t feed me that bullshit. You’re not a robot.”

“I have years of training at handling my emotions,” she says.

“Which is why your freak-outs are always very sedate and understated.” Clint tosses the bag back and forth between his hands—the world’s least exciting juggling act.

“I don’t have freak-outs.”

“You’re not on a mission, Natasha. This is your home. You don’t have to keep your emotions in check. This is where you get to be upset.”

“Give me my bag,” she says.

“Take it from me.”

“ _Give me my bag_!”

The scream steals the breath from her. She stands face-to-face with Clint, gasping, not even close to crying. He holds the bag out to her, and she rips it from his hands.

“This is your home,” he repeats, softer this time. Or maybe it just sounds that way, in the wake of her explosion. Clint walks to the door and open it, and Natasha thinks that maybe, finally, he’ll let her leave.

“EVERYONE COME QUICK!” he screams down the stairs. “NATASHA’S TRYING TO RUN AWAY!”

She swings her arm around his neck and pulls him back from the door in a headlock. “You understand that when I say I know one thousand ways to kill you with only the objects within a two foot radius, that I’m not kidding, right?”

“I’m pretty sure you can’t take on a Thor/Hulk tag-team,” he says, pointing to the open door. Sure enough, Bruce and Thor are charging up the stairs, Steve and Tony close behind, marching in line like it’s the Avengers’ Day Parade. Natasha pushes Clint away.

“If I might ask what’s going on,” Bruce says.

“Clint’s being an idiot.”

“Natasha’s being a bigger idiot.”

Tony pushes his way in front of Thor. “Now, now, children, there’s plenty of room on the dumb spectrum for all of you.” He glances at the duffel bag and clothing on the sofa and quirks an eyebrow. “Going on vacation, are we?”

Natasha crosses her arms, building her body language into a wall. “I think it would be best for everyone if I left.”

The chorus of protests is loud and chaotic, but Natasha picks out Rogers’ level-headed, “Come on now, be reasonable,” and Thor’s booming, “HAVE WE WRONGED YOU SOMEHOW, MY FRIEND?” She holds up a hand, and they die down.

When they do, though, she finds she has nothing to say.

“Why don’t you guys let me handle this?” Tony says. “Go have some ice cream or something, and I’ll stay here with Natasha. If that’s all right with you?” 

She nods, and the others slowly file out. Clint leaves last, and reluctantly.

When they’ve gone, Tony wanders over to the floor-to-ceiling windows and fingers Natasha’s lace curtains.

“You know, I didn’t build this thing out of glass so you could obscure the view,” he says.

“My room. My decision.”

“Yeah, well, maybe once you leave I’ll redecorate. What do you think, should I go Victorian? Nah, it’d clash. Ooh, I know! Fifties! Retro-chic!”

Natasha leans against the back of the sofa. “You’re not nearly as clever as you think you are.”

“Luckily,” Tony says, “I think I’m pretty clever.”

Natasha waits. After a moment, Tony turns to face her. She doesn’t know how he can stand to have his back to such a long drop.

“So, I take it this about the, you know.”

“Rape,” Natasha supplies. It baffles her that Tony thinks he’s the guy for the job of talking her down, when he can’t even name what’s happened. “I thought it would be better for Pepper, if she didn’t have to see me.”

“Pepper _wants_ to see you,” Tony says. “I assume you know that, actually, since she’s been actively seeking you out, and you’re not _that_ dumb. She says she thinks you might be the only one who can understand.”

Natasha stares out the window at the blinking lights of the city she helped save. “I don’t want to see her.”

“I’m sure she’ll be willing to give you space for as long as you need.”

“It’s her home,” Natasha says. “She shouldn’t have to.”

Tony stares at her for a beat longer than is comfortable, then abruptly turns away. He draws the curtains back and forth across the window. New York appears and disappears like a mother playing peekaboo.

“I don’t have a lot of friends,” Tony says. “I’d rather not lose the ones I have.”

“Because of course this, like everything, is all about you.”

“Thanks for noticing. What I’m saying is, if you really want to go—if you really can’t stand being in the same building as Pepper, or if it’s just too much for you, or if you need to be alone—if you really want to, go. But if you’re leaving because you don’t think we’re willing to go a little out of our way to help you, or you think we’ll think less of you for being, you know, upset that you were raped, I’m saying that I want you here. And so does everyone else in the building.”

Natasha walks to the door and opens it. Tony watches her carefully.

“I’d say you were the most irritating person in the world,” she says, “but I’ve met Clint. You coming?”

Tony laughs crazily and follows her down the stairs.

They’re all waiting for her in the living room, trying very hard not to look like that’s what they’re doing. Rogers has a sketchbook out, and is scribbling—literally, drawing scribbles—with a charcoal pencil. Thor is pressing buttons on the remote control at random, making the television light up with bad reality shows and static. Bruce and Clint are playing the world’s least competitive game of checkers. Tony is behind her, leaning on the railing and looking smug, and somewhere waiting in the tower is Pepper, who will give her space until she’s ready to talk.

Natasha surveys her team, and knows she will never leave them.


End file.
